Ann Packer’s new novel explores knotty terrain of middle-class life

Ann Packer grew up in Stanford and found that California was in her blood.

Ann Packer grew up in Stanford and found that California was in her blood.

Photo: Lisa Noble

Photo: Lisa Noble

Image
1of/3

Caption

Close

Image 1 of 3

Ann Packer grew up in Stanford and found that California was in her blood.

Ann Packer grew up in Stanford and found that California was in her blood.

Photo: Lisa Noble

Ann Packer’s new novel explores knotty terrain of middle-class life

1 / 3

Back to Gallery

Ann Packer’s house in San Carlos is on a street lined with many literal opportunities to stop and smell the roses — it’s a perfect place for the writer, self-described as a private person, to live and work. At the kitchen table of her pin-drop-quiet bungalow, she is measured and thoughtful in describing her childhood in nearby Stanford, where both her parents were professors, up to her current life as an author.

Packer’s most recent book, “The Children’s Crusade,” chronicles one California family over five decades and the complex drama surrounding them and their family home. The book reveals a masterful ability to inhabit characters, span time and render a setting that is unmistakably California. The initial spark for the book came from an idea about a sister and a younger brother who comes home in trouble. She put the characters on hold while she wrote the story collection “Swim Back to Me,” then returned to the idea.

“When I left California to go to college, I didn’t have a strong emotional connection to it,” she said. “I didn’t miss it. But when I came back, particularly in the last 10 years, the landscape and weather and flora have either come to occupy me or I’ve come to recognize that they occupy me in an important visceral way.” She began hiking trails in the area, which is how she chose the Portola Valley setting for “The Children’s Crusade.”

Bay Area author Sylvia Brownrigg, who has known Packer for more than 10 years, described Packer’s new novel as a “perfectly rendered group portrait of one middle-class family. The book’s many emotional truths, both painful and joyful, are the sort that make reading fiction worthwhile.” She said Packer’s “powers of observation are as acute as those of any writer I know. Her novels and stories are searingly vivid, the characters so fully realized that it seems impossible that they are not actual people who might walk into the room.”

Originally, Packer had no intentions to write. Her mother had taught writing at Stanford, and her brother George had literary aspirations he went on to fulfill; he’s a staff writer at the New Yorker. Ann Packer was an English major at Yale, with “really vague” thoughts about ending up in publishing, when a friend suggested they apply to a fiction writing class.

“I had no interest in writing at all, but that was only my conscious mind. Clearly my unconscious mind had some interest,” she said. When she enrolled in the fiction class, Packer remembers that she “loved it immediately. It was absolutely a feeling of coming home. The work itself was a revelation — how enjoyable it was.”

Iowa and beyond

Upon graduating, Packer moved to New York and worked at Ballantine Books for five years. She then got into the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she studied from 1986 to 1988.

Packer said talking about fiction in her classes at Iowa opened her eyes. “It’s as if I knew a language I had never studied, but I just discovered that I knew it,” she said. “Those early workshops at Iowa really told me that this was what I should be doing.”

The New Yorker accepted her story “Mendocino” while she was at Iowa, and it was published shortly after graduation — her first time in print. A fellowship at the University of Wisconsin followed, then she and her then-husband moved to Eugene, Ore., where their two children were born. They ultimately returned to the Bay Area in 1995, where Packer has remained ever since.

Her first story collection, “Mendocino (And Other Stories),” was published in 1994, and as gratifying as it was to have that first book published, it was a small success compared with what came next. Packer wrote her second book, “The Dive from Clausen’s Pier,” over a period of almost 10 years while raising her children, in Oregon, then in San Carlos.

When she finished it, she had difficulty finding an agent who would take the book on. Because her first book had such a small run, Packer said she “definitely did not strongly have a feeling of literary legitimacy. I certainly wanted and hoped to publish the novel, but I didn’t have any conviction it would happen. I had a lot of agents turn it down. For a very long time, it did not seem to me like it was a sure thing that it would find its way into print.”

But one agent, Geri Thoma, signed Packer on, asking for a light rewrite, after which she sold the book to Knopf in only a couple of days.

“The Dive From Clausen’s Pier,” which centers on a young woman’s questioning of whether to stay with her fiance after he suffers a debilitating accident, became the first book of “Good Morning America’s” book club in 2002, catapulting Packer into the limelight. Aside from an awkward spot on TV, where she says her mouth was “very dry,” the experience was positive.

“Having my first novel be a really big best-seller was very, very surprising,” she said. She remembers meeting readers on the tour being a particularly rewarding part of the experience. “It was a great lesson in how writing and publishing a book is really composed of two really separate processes, one being very personal and the other belonging to the reader rather than to the writer. The meaning of a book is made by each reader, one at a time.”

Feeling her way in the dark

Packer enjoys writing but acknowledged that it’s challenging. “I don’t enjoy it when I’m struggling, but I’m aware that there will be enjoyment. I can’t overstate how much I don’t think about writing. I just do it. I’m feeling my way in the dark.”

Her female characters risk a lot, often in pursuit of their passions and art. Many of them struggle with balancing the demands of their family and their personal pursuits. “Maybe what people find uncomfortable is how your passion is divided. When you’re an artist, your heart is both with your art and your family. I think it’s potentially guilt-inducing to try to divide your heart.”

Packer does all her writing in her studio, a sun-lit garden shed in the backyard, six paving stones from the back door of her house. It’s organized with a few of her children’s drawings on the wall, and a couple of her heroes’ pictures hanging above her desk.

“Writing wakes something up in me,” she said. “The first parts, you’re still yawning, thinking maybe you can go back to sleep, wishing you’d close the curtains, and you’re a little stiff. As you awaken, the state of being awake starts to beckon, and that’s a good analogy of how writing feels to me.”

Packer says that with each of her books, there’s a theme that she hasn’t developed as much as she wants, “and I bring that theme to the next book.” A friendship from “The Dive From Clausen’s Pier” informed “Songs Without Words,” and the affair in “Songs Without Words” made its way into “The Children’s Crusade.”

Asked if she knows what theme from “The Children’s Crusade” will blossom into her next novel, she says, “I do, but it’s too soon to tell. It’s too fragile.”

Anisse Gross’ writing has been published in the Believer, TheNewYorker.com, the Rumpus and elsewhere. E-mail: books@sfchronicle.com